Ethiopianism

Ethiopianism is the name scholars have given to the race redemption ideas that black theologians and theorists in different parts of the English-colonized world derived from biblical Ethiopia. The term was originally used in the 1890s in South Africa to describe secessionist black churches, which were called Ethiopian denominations after the perennially free black nation of Ethiopia. The expression was not used to describe Ethiopian elements in black American thought until the 1970s, when scholars of black nationalism first discerned signs of an Ethiopian ideological tradition in America.

From the late 18th to the late 20th century, the ancient African country Ethiopia symbolized an idealized mythical space, an African Zion, for people of African descent globally. The peculiar mystique Ethiopia has held among Africans worldwide stems from its recognition as a major biblical civilization, its history of uninterrupted independence, and its having a longer Christian heritage than most of Europe can claim. As a distinctive emblem of black precocity, power, and promise, esteemed Ethiopia gave suppressed Africans during slavery, colonialism, and segregation a particularly strong sense of racial pride and inspiration. Its significance even surpassed that of dynastic Egypt, an African state that black Bible readers greatly respected for its might and majesty but generally viewed as a slave society.

An attachment to Ethiopia among African Americans began before the American Revolution. Starting in the 1760s, some enslaved Africans who had converted to Christianity and conformed to English culture, like the authors Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon, occasionally used the term Ethiopia to mean all Africans everywhere. The Ethiopian nomenclature or some related cognomen also appeared in the names of early black religious congregations, such as the Ethiopian Anabaptist Church in Georgia and the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York. By the 1800s, an emergent black American intelligentsia that included the influential Methodist bishop Richard Allen had begun to employ religious rhetoric that proclaimed the Ethiopian's worldwide deliverance, spiritually and secularly.

Thus the literary custom in the West of using Ethiopia as a generic term for all Africans stimulated increasingly widespread use of the term, as did sacred scripture, most notably, “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall stretch forth its hands unto God” (Psalms 68:31–32). This prophecy, which African converts to Christianity first adopted during the 18th century's great religious revival, referred to spiritual submission to the Hebrews' God. However, black clergy such as Peter Williams, Jr., of the St. Philip's African Church in New York, interpreted the passage as a salvation-liberation text. Williams and other black clerics—Absolom Jones, Daniel Coker, and J. W. C. Pennington—evolved from the verse the vision of a resplendent African past and future.

In the antebellum era, protest pamphleteers such as David Walker and Alexander Young used various Hebraic and Hellenic sources to identify the Nile Valley as the origin of all Africans. This theorized common Nilotic identity made Africans collectively, whatever their provenance and predicament, inheritors of a shared and acclaimed ancestry. Black publicists also crafted from biblical Egypt and Ethiopia a cyclical view of black history, one in which the inception, regression, and renewal of African ascendancy was predestined. These beliefs—an esteemed black identity, history, and destiny—constitute the core of a salvation ideology that is in direct opposition to racist denigration and racial despair.

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